Woah. This is wicked! I wrote a ping pong game that had an AI player about two or three years ago in C++, the algorithm isn’t very difficult to figure out, but here’s one built-into a robot! RoboCup claims that they’ll win the international soccer championship by 2050, and I think table tennis will be much easier (because japanese are the best in robotics AND table tennis ;)
Pro Web 2.0 Mashups
Finally, I got the book about Remixing Data and Web Services and read about 3 chapters. It seems that everyone is already mixing up all kinds of data from sources like Google Maps and News, Flickr photos, delicious bookmarks, last.fm charts and others. The very first mashups like Housingmaps.com are brilliant, and with Yahoo! Pipes coming along, things seem to get much easier for people without...
Windows Live Writer
The Pro Web 2.0 Mashups book I wrote about earlier is going great and I finally got to the blogging chapters. Standalone blogging, yeah that was a news for me. I mean it is obvious that offline/standalone blogging is applicable to WordPress and other blogging systems, and that’s one of the main reasons why the XML-RPC protocol is supported by them, right? Well I just didn’t see the...
Google Maps and UTF-8
I bet everyone’s already using the UTF-8 encoding for all their pages. Well, windows-1251 remains the most popular russian encoding, although many people have realized that 1251 won’t go far. I’ve been binding some Google Maps to a cp1251 page and hadn’t had any trouble viewing it through mozilla firefox and opera browsers, but when I switched to internet explorer, I had...
WordPress 2.7
There’s been a lot of noise after the 2.7 beta release and I really liked the First Look at WordPress 2.7 article by Weblog Tools Collection. So I’m really looking forward to upgrade. I’m currently running 2.6.3 and my WordPress keeps yelling for 2.6.5 upgrade, but I think I’ll stay to 2.6.3 cause it seems pretty stable, unlike 2.6.2 where I had some problems setting up WP...
Robotics in Russia
Hey, just had another exhibition here in Moscow, and we’ve finally presented the new AR-600 android robot. It looks a lot like ASIMO, but it’s totally new. It doesn’t know how to walk yet, but that’s only a matter of time – the mechanics are strong enough to hold that 100 kg robot on one leg! If anybody’s interested, be sure to check out the photos and videos...
Finally, WordPress 2.7
I’m so proud they finally did it. After the RC2 coming out I thought they’ll have problems up until January, but there they go! It’s nice to see that people are already upgrading their blogs, and as for Russia, we’ve got developers who’ve done the translation already, so I guess I’ll be running it in two or three weeks. Don’t wanna hurry though, and...
Fedora Linux 10 Partitioning
Okay, so I had my Fedora 10 system running out of disk space a few days ago, so I started looking for solutions to re-partition my hard drive. Yeah, GParted seemed like a good one, but it hasn’t got the power to resize currently mounted partitions, nor to run batch-scripts like Symantec Partition Magic (windows) does. The structure of my hard-drive looked something like this in the exact...
MySQL Charset Issues
And yet another MySQL character set problem solved. I had a remote FreeBSD server running MySQL 4.0 and a local Windows server running MySQL 5.0 (the XAMPP web servers package). I had no problems doing an export from MySQL 4.0 (running on cp1251 charset) to MySQL 5.0 (running utf8 charset) with something like this: mysqldump -u -p --default-character-set=cp1251 dbname tablename > table.sql...
Twitter on Fedora Linux
I got tired of using my web browser for twittering, so I looked for some twitter applications for linux. A list of the best ones can be found in the Twitter Fan Wiki. I’ve tried a couple, but Twitux suited me best. It looks pretty good, runs under Gnome and supports gui-notifications. To install Twitux on a Fedora machine change to root and yum install it: su - yum install twitux That will...